Blizzard is tracking 180,000 bugs in WoW

During the keynote today at the Austin Game Developers Conference, Executive Vice President Frank Pearce and Production Director J. Allen Brack spoke at length about the internal workings of the WoW team and how they get their jobs done.

One of the more stunning things to come out of the keynote, which we'll have fully written up for you later today, is the fact that there are just under 180k bugs Blizzard is tracking in WoW. That means their bug database has 180,000 entries which are in some stage of being fixed (have been fixed, have not been fixed, or being worked on).

To me this number seems very large for a video game. I can understand an operating system like Windows 7 having an unreasonably large number of bugs in it like this, but for a video game -- even one as complex as WoW -- that number is quite astounding.

It does raise the inevitable question: what is Blizzard doing to fix all these? And how does this relate to the extremely long wait times for GM contact in game? We also learned that Blizzard only employs 2500 worldwide in Customer Service. That includes things like phone bank operators, GMs, forum mods, etc...

While those 2500 people might seem like a lot, and in many ways it is, the recent customer service level of WoW shows that these resources might not be enough.

On that note as well, I'm quite surprised that Blizzard actually released these numbers. I loath what the forums will look like in a day when people start quipping to Nethaera or Ghostcrawler about the 180,000 bugs. But it was Blizzard's decision to put that number out there. Here's hoping it doesn't skyrocket to 200,000 when Ony starts to spawn more Whelps in patch 3.2.2.